


every story has its chapter in the desert

by howlikeagod



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Gen, basically just...how i might like monster's reflection to end. how it might go., listen i read some siken and got in my feelings it happens to the best of us, would be a coda if this episode had actually come out yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 05:54:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14928428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howlikeagod/pseuds/howlikeagod
Summary: The worst part is never the dream.





	every story has its chapter in the desert

 

> _Every story has its chapter in the desert, the long slide from kingdom_
> 
> _to kingdom through the wilderness,_
> 
> _where you learn things, where you’re left to your own devices._

-“Driving, Not Washing,” Richard Siken

 

* * *

 

Juno Steel had a brother once: fact.

Juno Steel had a mother once: debatable.

Juno Steel had an eye, and a gun, and a badge and a home to go back to with a bed that wasn’t always empty. Juno has turned each of these things over in his hands, in his mind, in the dark spaces between the losing and the learning to live with the loss.

As far as the latter goes, his track record isn’t so shiny. Living, that is; learning to.

Outside, the Martian sand beats against the walls of the clinic like it’s under siege. Sandstorm after sandstorm, that’s what this planet has to offer. Storm after storm, and the living decay of radiation bearing down.

“Drink your tea,” Brown Jacket says. He looks as steady as the last time Juno saw him, before he drove a machine into Juno’s brain and waited outside the walls of his body. Juno sat through a reboot of his own nightmares, his own life ( _what’s the difference?_ ) only to get things back and lose them again. His hands are shaking.

“You gonna ask, or what?”

“I assumed you would not want me to pry.”

Juno snorts. “I saved the yaks, or whatever.”

“You also dreamed of yaks?” Jacket leans in closer. His face like a mountainside, brown and weathered smooth, hovers in the half-vision Juno had so easily forgotten how to get used to.

“No.”

He could make a joke here about the metaphor going over Jacket’s head. You’d think it’d be harder to gain the altitude, he could say.

It doesn’t feel funny, even in his mind.

“That is good to hear, Juno.” Jacket’s voice is the even rumble of a seismic tremor. If things were different, it would be so easy to dive headfirst into the fissures left behind. But Juno sent out his hailing signal, the moment he saw those hands that could twist his neck like a kid with an injured bird ( _a kid with sooty hands and a heart that hasn’t been polished as long as he can remember, all the grime around him rubbing off and no way to get himself clean_ ). He sent out the _Yes, please,_ and got nothing back but static.

That’s fine. It’s better, even, than tilting at windmill mistakes— again. Not the time. Certainly not the place.

“What, that I didn’t steal your buddy’s dream yaks?”

“That you succeeded.”

“Yeah, well.”

The wind outside sounds like the engine of an interstellar vessel, the kind you get on in a hurry and never look back. It rumbles the thin metal walls of their sanctuary.

Juno drinks his tea.

“It’s funny,” he says, because Jacket isn’t talking. “In the last hour, I’ve had to relive the single two worst days of my life. And that bar is pretty goddamn high, if you haven’t noticed.”

“You have been stabbed two separate times since I started keeping an eye on you,” Jacket nods. “This seems like an accurate statement about the way things tend to go for you, yes.”

“One of those wasn’t my fault.”

“I do not disagree. But I fail to see the humor in this, Juno.”

“No, that’s not the funny part. And I don’t mean funny like, like— Ugh,” Juno growls. “Never mind.”

Jacket keeps his stony silence. Stony, not in the sense of restraint; stony like mountains, like craters, like the planet turning steadily with Juno indescribably small upon its surface. Like a stone, some untold story not hidden but illegible to anyone who doesn’t know how to look. Like a stone, Juno doesn’t want to care.

“It’s funny,” Juno says, “that the worst part wasn’t the dream.”

“Then what was it?”

“It was—” He wouldn’t say this if he could help it. Admitting the fact is a string tied around a loose tooth, too tender to let alone; Juno is slamming the door himself. “Waking up.”

“I am told the after-effects of the surgery are—”

“Not that. I do feel like I got run over by two star-haulers that played a game of chicken and both won, and this tea isn’t helping much, thanks.” He sighs so heavily it lifts his shoulders. “But that’s not what I meant.”

“You do not need to tell me this if you do not want to.”

If it were anybody else saying that to Juno, he’d think it meant _Shut up, I don’t want to hear it._ He’d think it meant _Does little baby Juno have problems? Does he think the world is big and mean and unfair? No point in whining, you better just get used to it, little mon—_

No.

No more of that.

He thinks it, simply: _No,_ and the voice that sounds a lot like him and a lot like her vanishes like smoke. Juno would be inclined to say it’s because of the freshly aching gap in his head, but he remembers his dream and he knows better.

Juno knows that’s not what Jacket means. The guy has a grand total of one facial expression and he can’t appreciate a good joke when he hears it; he’s the most honest and straightforward person Juno has ever met. So he recognizes this statement for what it is. He understands the gift of silence, given and accepted.

“I want to.”

“Then I will gladly listen.”

“I saw my brother. My twin. In the, the dream. He’s dead. Our mother killed him when he was nineteen years old. When we were four, he ran away from home.”

Juno hates how stilted he sounds. This is the order he dreamt it, not the order it happened; but does it matter? Really? The story gets told, one way or another, and he doesn’t have it in him to tell it with bells on.

“And this is what you saw?”

“I watched it happen again. I remembered.” Juno breathes in the fading steam from his tea. It was scalding hot when Jacket handed it to him, but now he can barely feel its heat through the cup. “But that’s not the problem. Because he wasn’t just a memory, he was… was…”

“He spoke to you. As if he were alive, as if he knew you in the present.”

“Yeah.” Juno feels his whole hand trembling. That doesn’t happen to him; steady hands, steady eyes, that’s what he built a life on. He’s already more than lost the latter half. “He was grown up. Like me, like my brain thought he would be if he hadn’t—”

Some trembling in Juno’s chin makes his whole face feel as if it’s about to collapse like a dying star. He drinks the tea.

“I woke up,” Juno finally says, “and I lost him all over again.”

The whole clinic—sterile in the way only abandoned places are—falls into silence. For just a second, Juno fears breaking it more than anything else in the whole shining galaxy; he will not cry.

“The storm is dying down.” Jacket says. Juno realizes what’s so peculiar about the silence. The wind, at last, does not rattle the walls or beat against the heavy door. “Finish your tea, and we will leave.”

“Right.” Juno sucks down the dregs, just shy of unpleasantly cold. He stands up; the floor sways from side to side, nearly rushes up to meet him, but Juno steadies himself again.

“I am sorry, Juno.”

“What?”

Jacket settles into the driver’s seat of his bike and looks up. His eyes are dark and soft in the shadow under the brim of his helmet.

“I am sorry. For what you saw in there, and what you have gone through. I know my condolences do not change your circumstances, but I wanted you to know. I am sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“You did very well.” Jacket hands him a helmet from the bag—the same one he wore last time, Juno recognizes. Blue with yellow stripes. The strap is still fitted to Juno’s chin. “I am happy that you are alive.”

“Yeah, I—” Juno pauses. He looks out at the Martian horizon. The sand shifts and skids over hard, flat stone in wavering patterns. No sign of life anywhere, easy to forget there is anything else at all. “Me too.”

Juno climbs in the side car and Jacket kicks the engine to life.

“Where would you like to go?” Jacket calls over the sound and the whipping-by of air and dust. “Your agreement with Buddy is over, your payment performed: you are free to go anywhere, Juno Steel.”

“Huh.”

Juno remembers what he has lost. He remembers what he has yet to lose. He thinks, cautiously, of what he might yet find again. He rolls his neck, takes a breath, and makes a choice.

The next in a long line of them, he hopes.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this with almost two weeks left before Monster's Reflection Part 3
> 
> Juno...buddy........please be ok


End file.
